Tivo8k TV guide: what is on, when it starts, and in which language

The Tivo8k TV guide (EPG, short for electronic program guide) is the grid of listings that runs alongside your live channels: the program on now, the minute it ends and whatever follows. Every plan includes it, for each channel whose broadcaster publishes a schedule. On-demand films and series never air at a fixed time, so they stay in their own sections rather than in the grid.

It is a convenience, not the reason to subscribe: you pay for the line-up, the library and what reaches your speakers, and a working guide gets you to them with less scrolling.

What sits inside a listing, and what your player shows

The grid is drawn from an XMLTV data file. Each entry can carry far more than a title; players choose how much to show.

The last four rows matter most here. The format can say a film is dubbed with an original track available, or that a match has surround sound and subtitles, yet broadcasters fill those fields unevenly and most apps ignore them. Where yours shows them, as a badge or a line in the details, read it as a hint, then confirm in the audio and subtitle menus once the program plays.

Getting the Tivo8k EPG into your player

Which route the listings take depends on how you signed in. With the Xtream Codes details, the order of events on a first sign-in usually runs like this:

1. The channel list arrives

   Groups and channels appear first, with the grid beside them still blank.

2. Listings follow on their own

   Most apps, TiviMate and IPTV Smarters Pro among them, then download the guide data unprompted. Allow a few minutes, more on an older stick.

3. Check one row against the clock

   Open a news channel near the top of the hour and see whether the bulletin begins where the grid says it should.

Where a player offers both routes, take this one; the Tivo8k Xtream Codes setup walks through each field.

The M3U link is different. A playlist names channels and streams and says nothing about times, so many apps load every channel but leave the schedule area empty. You fill it by adding the xmltv.php address, served from the same machine as the streams, with your username and password tacked on:

{server URL from your login}/xmltv.php?username={username}&password={password}

There is nothing to assemble: support sends it filled in, in the WhatsApp chat where your login arrived. Paste it into whichever field your app calls EPG, guide or XMLTV; in TiviMate it is attached to the playlist as an EPG source. Apps that only take a playlist are covered in using Tivo8k with an M3U playlist.

Refreshing the listings, and when to leave them alone

Your player reloads listings by itself every so often, so refresh by hand only to fix something: after correcting the clock, after adding the xmltv.php address, or when a once-full row goes blank.

• TiviMate: recent versions keep an update option, and the automatic interval, among the EPG settings.
• IPTV Smarters Pro: the refresh moves between versions; signing out and back in also pulls a fresh copy.
• Other apps: quit completely, then start again.

Channels publish different distances ahead, so a row that is full today and sparse by the weekend is expected.

When the Tivo8k guide runs early or late

Listings are stamped in universal time with an offset, and the player converts them by your device’s clock. A grid wrong by the same amount on every channel therefore points at the device, not the data. Fix it in this sequence:

1. In the TV, stick or box settings, turn on network date and time and choose the correct zone. A hand-set clock never follows daylight saving, which pushes the whole grid an hour out twice a year.
2. Close the player fully, reopen it and update the guide.
3. Only if every row is still out by an identical amount, set the player’s EPG offset or time shift (not every version has one) to match it.

A foreign channel that looks shifted may be translated correctly: a film starting at 10 p.m. in Madrid lands at 4 p.m. on a New York screen for most of the year. With 60+ countries in the line-up, that is the guide doing its job.

Rows with nothing in them

An empty row means the app has no schedule paired with that channel. Three questions narrow it down.

• Is it every row? Then the listings are still on their way, or an M3U sign-in still has no xmltv.php address. Give it a few minutes, refresh, and paste the address if it is missing.
• Is it a one-off event feed? Channels opened for one match or one show often publish no schedule at all; their name is the program.
• Is it one ordinary channel among full ones? Its schedule is probably linked to the wrong identifier. That is ours to fix, so message us which channel.

A blank row still plays. If channels refuse to open as well, the guide is not your problem; go through the checks for when Tivo8k is not working.

How the guide leads to replay

Catch-up starts in the grid. On channels with an archive, entries behind the current time play from the opening minute when the app handles catch-up, and the audio and subtitle menus then behave as they do live. It depends on two things, listings present and listings on the right hour, since the request the app sends is a channel plus a start time: an hour of clock error means an hour of the wrong broadcast. Which channels keep an archive, and how each player shows it, is covered on the Tivo8k catch-up and replay page.